This challenge has you, as a teen, struggling to make money through only two means - painting, or novel writing. See how far you get - will you make it through the teen years? Start a family? Have children? Post your hints, strategies and questions here!

The Challenge

Artist does not refer to the Uni job. It means you are all unemployed.

You start off with a CAS adult and a CAS teen. Move them into a 2x3 or 3x2 (whatever) lot, and then kill the adult. You can also move the adult out, but that would be robbing yourself of easy-peasy ghost points. Build a house for your lovely, lonely teen, and be sure to include an easel and/or a computer, because otherwise, you're in a spot of trouble.

Your teen can only earn money by painting or writing novels. Rewards from school are just fine, but your teen cannot get a job! It's tough at first, but eventually, like any good artist, they learn not to care about hunger/sleep/cleaning. Or at least, you stop caring. Generally, the social bunny will follow you around and be annoyed when you tell him to shove off and stop reading your manuscript over your shoulder.

Once you've made it through the teen years, it's time to start thinking about the next generation. You can move in/marry service NPC's, but you will lose a point and they cannot get a job. No townies, due to their jobs and large amounts of cash. You can also have illicit romances, be abducted by aliens, or adopt. These relationships can be with any sim, playable or not. You just can't move them in.

Raise your heir/s well, and be sure to give them loads of creativity points. It's advised to get them on the easel as soon as you can, so that they start bringing home the bacon right from the start.

Now you just repeat it for the generations to follow! The challenge ends when your last artist dies and the dynasty ends, or when you finally give in and get one of them hitched. Of course, it would also end if you went bankrupt and had nothing to sell but your easel, thus hitting a dead end. The challenge will also end with the death of the tenth generation. At that point, stop everything and count up your points.

Aging must stay ON.
Aspiration rewards are allowed.
Hacks/cheats such as the platinum-maxing painting and the tombstone of life and death are forbidden!
The twins/abduction hacks are forbidden!
NO reloading after an accidental death or a bad chance card.
Using move_objects/restarting are only allowed in the case of a bug, or for the sake of interior design.
You must stay on the same lot, except in the case of a bug.

Here's the scoring:

1/2 point for every family friend you have at the end(round spare halves up).
1 point for each generation completed (from the heir's birth to death).
1 point for every 5,000 simoleons in your family's net worth at the end.
1 point if all ghosts are free-roaming, meaning they can spook your sims.
2 points for having all the ghost colors. Scissors death is not required to claim this bonus, and you only need the Cowplant death if you have University.
2 points for each platinum grave on the lot at the end.
2 points for every first-generation alien born on the lot.
3 points if a teenager can get straight A's for the entire time they're in highschool.
4 points any time an artist sim maxes out the creativity skill. (add an extra 2 points if it's maxed out before teenhood)
5 points for every set of twins.
6 points for alien twins (this cancels out the alien-birth point)
6 points for keeping one masterpiece (max creativity) painting from each generation
And give yourself an extra 10 points if you can stick it out through all 10 generations.

-1 point for marrying/moving in a sim.
-1 point for every townie who dies on your lot.
-1 point for every inbred sim born.
-1 point for every time a sim drops into aspiration failure, requiring a visit from the therapist.
-2 points for every time the repo man comes.

I've discovered a way to make the first generation a lot easier: Make your Founder a Knowledge sim. That way, the ghost scares and Creativity-building add easy Aspiration points to your sim's budget, that you can spend on Money Trees, Thinking Caps, and SmartMilk for the next generations (and maybe an Eclectic Energizer, to be used sparingly). Take two hours a day for homework, and they'll also get easy Aspiration for A+'s until they're grown-ups.

Give your Founder a small, very modest home. That way, they'll have money left over to live on until they can take care of themselves. It also saves money on the bills.

Gelatin can last over 24 hours on the counter before it spoils. Saves a lot of effort for a struggling artist juggling school, painting, trying to get her dead mother's ghost to show, and macking on Ricky Cormier, if she doesn't have to worry about a meal, too.

If you adopt for your next generations (and I am), Toddlers don't have that awkward baby stage to go through, and you can start them on the kiddie xylophone right away to get them some Creativity levels before they reach childhood. Make sure to potty train them and give them plenty of SmartMilk and attention, and they'll be able to entertain themselves while Mommy paints.

EDIT: Toddlers CAN live on SmartMilk alone. Save money by spending Aspiration instead.

Order take out and stuff it in your back pack. A pizza will last for 8 slices. Chinese food will last longer (though I think this was fixed with the pets patch).
Either way your food bill will be smallish and you will save energy because you dont have to cook or clean up.

Going to Uni would mean moving off the lot, so yes, it probably IS out. But the cowplant is a career reward from a career which you can only get after you graduate from University. If you can't get a job (or go to university to get the RIGHT job), I assume the buyable cowplant or something to unlock the career reward is legal?

And if you end up with a want for 6 children, I HOPE some of them are allowed to decide that painting is for sissies and they have other things to do with life besides stay home and paint all day? I HATE having more than 3 sims in a family. One heir to keep up the traditions, and everyone else out the door as soon as their scholarships are all ready would be about my speed.

If they can't move off the lot, how about the hacks by Squinge that let teens age to YAs and attend Uni from home? That's if you can't buy the cowplant, 'cause I could see no other way of getting it otherwise.

Actually, you don't need a CAS adult at the start of the challenge; make your teen, then age them to an adult so they can move in alone. Then use an aging cheat like the InSim to de-age them to teen. Problem solved

What happens if you get bitten by a vampire while on a date? (That Contessa is one bloodthirsty vampire ever since she got influenced to bite someone. But she DID avoid one person whom I wanted her to ignore, so she bought herself a reprieve from being invited over to investigate a cowplant. Now if only I can get her to wander past my fairy's toy and flower store so she can be influenced to drink one of the vampirocillin potions parked on the lot.....)

Actually, you don't need a CAS adult at the start of the challenge; make your teen, then age them to an adult so they can move in alone. Then use an aging cheat like the InSim to de-age them to teen. Problem solved

I thought of a way to get the cowplant ghost. You are allowed to visit other lots, just not move to them. And the rules don't specify the neighborhood must be an empty one. Back up your neighborhood before trying this, as graves sometimes vanish when you move them.

Get a sim from another family into Natural Science and earn a cowplant. Let it get hungry. Then invite the future ghost over for a visit. Have a hot tub handy and spend about an hour soaking in the hot tub and chatting to make sure the visitor is nice and clean. (Cowplants don't like dirty food.) Then go stand next to the hungry cowplant and call the visitor over. Send the grave to a community lot. When you quit and save, let your artist go to the community lot and send the grave back home.

Caution: you may want to do this one last, as it is likely to result in an angry ghost.

I started this one. I made a knowledge sim as a teen, got his mother bitten by a vampire and left her out in the sunlight all morning to kill her while her son was at school, and racked up a bunch of aspiration points from the (not very nice) ghost deciding to spook her son all night two or three times a week which caused him to go back to his easel instead of back to bed. But now he has a want to go to college and a fear of being uneducated. And he is on his last day as a teen. I can't bear to deliberately trigger his fear and ignore his want. So I may end up abandoning this one after all.

I thought of a way to get the cowplant ghost. You are allowed to visit other lots, just not move to them. And the rules don't specify the neighborhood must be an empty one. Back up your neighborhood before trying this, as graves sometimes vanish when you move them.

Get a sim from another family into Natural Science and earn a cowplant. Let it get hungry. Then invite the future ghost over for a visit. Have a hot tub handy and spend about an hour soaking in the hot tub and chatting to make sure the visitor is nice and clean. (Cowplants don't like dirty food.) Then go stand next to the hungry cowplant and call the visitor over. Send the grave to a community lot. When you quit and save, let your artist go to the community lot and send the grave back home.

Caution: you may want to do this one last, as it is likely to result in an angry ghost.

That's a lot of trouble to go through, and I don't feel like creating a new family just to get one ghost... I think it makes more sense just to take the cowplant off the list of required ghost colours, but if you choose to go through all that to get it anyway, you get bonus points or something. =/

so i'm trying this for lack of anything better to do and now i'm wondering if we can start home businesses to sell our art at marked up prices? i think i'm going to do this regardless, but i'd like to know if it's considered cheating.

Well, I started the Starving Artist Challenge today and here's what's going on thus far, for those who are interested:

I made an adult sim whom I named Olivia Ostheim, and her late husband Orlando Otheim in the CAS screen. I conbined their genetics to create my main character, Oakley Otheim. I deleted Orlando from my family and went on my merry way.

Once we got to the lot (it's a very tiny lot) I built Oakley a small and slightly grungy looking home that seems to have seen better days, and furnished it cheeply. I then got Oakley to work painting and...left Olivia in the middle of the road.

I couldn't bear to sell Oakley's first painting, so I hung it above her bed. It's pretty crappy, but hey, it's the first of many.

After the first day, Oakley went to school and Olivia...died. Sorry Olivia. I didn't want to cheat-kill her so I just left her there until she dropped dead I made her really pretty though, so if she comes back to haunt Oakley, at least she won't be an uggo...

Tear. Poor Oli.

Today, 8/30/08, I have one point for having a free-roaming ghost.

Oakley painting...

Can anyone tell me how to upload photos into the forums? I'm documenting this challenge well, but I cannot find most of the photos I took in-game in any of my EA games folders, and I do not know how to upload them onto a post. Thank you! :comp:

Well, I'll just go ahead and say it; I failed the starving artist challenge! I'm SO sorry. Oakley was making next to know money as an artist, and I just couldn't bear to have her die of starvation on me. I just couldn't do it. So I got her a job. Fail.

So now the Otheim saga has spun off into more of a legacy-type thing. So, "where is she now?"

If anyone wants me to post some pictures of the side story, please PM me.

...But of course I can't just let it end there.

SO, I'll make another starving artist. With all my new custom content I found on an old back-up disk! Pictures and story to follow!

This artist will be named Siobhan, and we'll all love her. And hopefully I won't cave into the whiney "Shoo-flee!" this time. But I make my simmies just so darn cute, it's hard to resist!

BTW, any tips on pictures, how to make sure they're snapshots, not thumbnails? I haven't figured out how to specifically make snapshots, and those are the ones that look nicest, and I know you all like nice pictures

Thanks for the nice PM Ani, I'm so exited someone actually reads my Starving Artist updates! I'll be making Siobhan's first female child named Ani in honor of my first comment/PM on the starving artist challenge.